‘Lineliai’, poem by E. Mieželaitis, images by A. Surgailienės.

This book arrived to me in a parcel from a close friend, following a trip that included Lithuania, a country I know next to nothing about. It was accompanied by a white and red woven bookmark from Latvia. Fortunately there was also a postcard which tells me that my dear friend ‘…went into a second hand bookshop in old town Tallin and thumbed through the children’s books when [she] came across this beautiful one! [she] stupidly asked the shopkeeper what the title said – turns out it’s in Lithuanian[…]’. No kidding.

She later said she would like to keep this if I didn’t like it. She can’t. I do.

Upon further investigation on both our accounts, we could find some information about the poet, but unfortunately none about the artist. I believe, and I could be wrong, that this is the first edition of this book, published in 1960 with a print run of 25,00 copies, each costing 2 rubles (the new value of the ruble being 20 kopecks). The cover is paper, like the pages and it is saddle stitched with two staples, a rather flimsy artefact, but a beautiful one!

Eduardas Mieželaitis was a poet and the story told in this book is about the life cycle of flax. From the pages we see the sowing of the seed in ploughed fields, the sun growing the plant which provides a home for birds and insects, harvesting, making bushels, the day is over, processing the flax, spinning, weaving. While I’m sure the language is beautifully lyrical (despite not understanding a word), I love the naivety and crudeness of the lino?cuts. These clearly reference the traditional folk art of Lithuania, with bold patterns embossed with smaller v-gauges adding texture. These small marks create a beautiful rhythm that works in harmony with the strong shapes created by the people and environment of the story.

The colour palette is slightly subdued but adds a richness in support of the strong graphic nature of the medium. The format, too, benefits from a wide white border on each spread, balancing with the text boxes to provide a counterpoint for the highly patterned and textured borders and images. It reminds me in this regard of medieval illuminated manuscripts, without the minute detail but still presenting such strong visual appeal.

A last mention goes to the depictions of old/archaic flax practices that (when they appear) sit always to the left of the main illustration creating a time sequence old-new. This adds another layer to the story and provides a sense of tradition, ‘what we do today follows what we have done in the past’.

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Side Note: Reading about the history of Lithuania, I was delighted to see a rich history of arts, literature and culture, including a period that saw book smugglers saving the Lithuanian culture from Russification! (it’s little wonder these guys make great books when they have a ‘day of the book smugglers’!). Read more about these antiheroes here, here, and here.